‘And so your parents sent you away? Just because you were such a clever boy? Because you were gifted? Because you were so good-looking?’

‘I thought then that it was a curse and not a gift,’ he admitted. ‘I used to stand beside my father when he was seated by the fire and he would put his arm around me, and take coins from his pocket and ask me to calculate the value if he spent half of them, if he spent a third, if he put half out at interest and earned fifteen per cent but lost the other half. And always I was right – I could just see the answers as if written on the air, I could see the numbers as if they were shining with colours, and he would kiss my forehead and say “my boy, my clever boy”, and my mother would say “he is your boy” as if it should be repeated, and he should be reassured.

‘And then, one summer, strangers came to the village, a travelling troupe of Egyptians, and I went down to see them with the other village children and I heard them speaking amongst themselves. The children laughed at them, and someone threw a stone; but one of the gypsies saw me watching them and said something aside to me, and I answered him – I had their language in a moment, the very moment that I heard it. That was the end of it really. Next morning we found a thick ring of salt, all around the farmhouse, and a horseshoe at north, south, east and west.’

‘Salt?’

‘A faerie can’t cross iron and salt. They thought that they would imprison me. That decided it. My parents were afraid that they would trap me inside the house and then burn the house down.’ He shrugged. ‘It happens. People are afraid of what they cannot understand. It was not that they did not respect my father. But I did not have playmates among the village children, I was never quite like them, I could never talk easily with them. I could not fit with them. I was different and we couldn’t deny it any more. My mother and father agreed that it was too dangerous for me to be in the outside world and they sent me to the monastery for safety.’

‘Did you fit there?’ she asked, thinking of her own experience in the nunnery where she had been isolated and alone but for Ishraq, another outsider.

He shook his head. ‘Freize took a liking to me,’ he smiled. ‘He was the only one. He was the kitchen boy and he used to steal food to feed me up. And as soon as they taught me to read and calculate I started to ask questions.’

‘Questions?’

He shrugged. ‘I couldn’t help it. But it turned out that most questions are heresies.’

‘And then the Ottoman slaving galleys took your mother and father?’ Isolde prompted him quietly.

Luca sighed, as if he still could not bear to think of it. ‘You know, it’s been four years now, but I think of them every day . . . I have to know if they survived the raid. If they are alive I should save them. They did everything for me. I want to see them again. And if I am too late and they are dead, then I should honour their deaths and see them properly buried. If Johann is right and they will rise again in Jerusalem then I feel as if I have to go with him. It’s like a calling; a sacred duty.’